


The Map of Homeward Vectors

by Nemonus



Category: Destiny (Video Game)
Genre: Drabble Collection, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-24
Updated: 2018-12-12
Packaged: 2019-01-04 23:36:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 22
Words: 8,515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12178692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/pseuds/Nemonus
Summary: Book hawkers shout for Warlocks, the sniper waits with empty hands above the verdant City, and the broods on Titan crawl to the rhythm of patient songs. The new Tower is open, and the City brings stories. The Destiny 2 edition of my drabble collection, cross-posted from Tumblr.





	1. 1 AU [Guardian]

This is what it means to be a Guardian.

She burns. This close to the Sun, it’s only some resilient madness of the Light that keeps her fieldweave from igniting. She moves from shadow to shadow in slides and crouches. To shoot the white-hot Cabal troopers is as easy as a heartbeat. It is her only communication to the universe now, and therefore means nothing. But to go from shadow to shadow she must breathe deeply, evenly, must count her own heartbeats. Back in the world not spitting fire wait Ikora, Hawthorne, somewhere, Eris — she steps forward toward them. 

This is what it means to be a Guardian, as she walks closer to the Sun than any child of Earth before her. It means to move from scorching heat to besieged shadow. It means to fight despair at any moment like she fights the fire, constantly and mercilessly. She will leave this place, but this place will not leave her. The patches of shade are so small. 

When she drags the Dawnblade out of the air, the proximity almost blinds her. She feels the atoms rip as the sword slides free. The wings combust a Psion and a Cabal around her by virtue of existing, singeing through a shield half-unfurled and a cyclopean eye.

This is not what it means to be a Guardian. This is an external expression of an internal process. This is toothy metaphor.

The Warlock learns on the Almighty what Hawthorne will learn: that to be a Guardian is to take one step after another in the firestorm. 

Naturally, it is a lesson which must be learned over and over. 


	2. The Bad Ending [Toland]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To the degree that my internal fanon has canon, this ... isn't. But that mission with the crystals produced just the most delightful feeling of dread. The warning in the tags applies to this chapter, because if you've followed me this far, he's likely a major character to you, too...

there were the waiting days. the Sea of Screams has dead places, stagnant crusts of salt without legend or rumor, and those are when Toland searched for Osiris and wrote messages with his fingertips on smoke canvases that will be more than smoke when they arrive in the Tower. All he was then was loose-leaf pages, sonnets dropped from his own records 

there were the courtly days, when he found the terrible oily gulf that is Savathûn’s court. the mother morph is preoccupied with her alchemical children, talking blindly of neuter Taox and her engines (these will be my engines, _mine_ , sibling, just _mine_ ). Toland drew golden webbing around his shoulders for comfort

there was the regard, the attention of the three bright eyes. there was an in-drawing of breath through the mother’s mouth, a thaumaturgical seeking that pulled at the space between Toland’s molecules where, like the colors in a photonegative, she could see the gray remnants of the Light. She tasted the Sun and found it burned her. She tasted the Void and found that it increased her.

Toland could not be sure whether he had bowed of his own accord or not. this had never been of great concern.

there was the folding, the shutters smacking together one by one on the atomic level. there were Savathûn’s encrusted, entumored hands shaping the prison for him. Toland’s awareness folded, small and smaller, more and more orderly, until the box that was himself suffocated on top of him, and maybe fingertips on the inside of the crystal, and then there was the crystal 


	3. Perfectly Normal Prophecy [Xur]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by the fact that Xur is active in both Destiny and Destiny 2 at the same time.

You cannot tell them.

You feel the truth in your molecules, in the slight sideways shake of the center of your cells.

You say: “A weapon will save you and a weapon will destroy you.”

You say: “My will is not my own,” but you can find loopholes, gentle eddies in the governance of you through which can flow new energies. “Have you seen the sovereign roll in the riches?”

This is vague enough that Guardians will piece it together into tens of new theories, most of which will be wrong. This keeps you safe.

They say to one another, “That mission was really … relaxing?” They agree.

You say, “The walls are not enough.”

They wonder.

They say, “Maybe these dragons aren’t the same as those dragons.”

The filigree on the gun does not matter. Only the mechanism of the gun. You say, “A gun is a conversation made of only one word.”

In the other world, you say the same things. You return/go for the first time to Io and Nessus and Titan. You hope that your repetition will be comforting, because it speaks of survival in both the time before the attack and the time after.

You yourself do not know the nature of the attack, or know it in one time but cannot articulate it in the other, or have been denied permission to discuss it and therefore to think about it. Your words are not your own. Time is pinned to space is pinned to what is left of your flesh with glass needles. But you know. The more vague you become the more universal you are allowed to be, and it is in the nature of the orbiting worlds for universality to become specific in the end. You exhale hope the Guardians cannot see.

You say, “Take this for your fight,” and they do not wonder which one.


	4. Mirror [Eris/Toland]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by [this post](http://jencforcarolina.tumblr.com/post/166877300438/light-and-love). Will I just continue to write endless iterations of the Pit disaster even though they're not actually related to Destiny 2? Seems likely.

Eris Morn sensed another version of herself in the maze.

Like looking in a mirror, it had a flatness that suggested she was not facing a copy conjured up by the Dark. Stranger things might have happened here, in the caves marinating in the stench of the Hive as they carved their nests into the regolith, but this was not a double. Any competent maker of traps would have had to create something more convincing. The reflection sputtered with Light as she did, Guardian-stuff calling out at the cellular level and then fading. The person’s Light had gone out.

Alone, Eris had begun to scale a black cliff slick with water, which she thought might lead her to the surface. What ambitions her fireteam had had when they arrived! Toland the Shattered would be able to lead them through the maze, so that the rest of them could concentrate on the killing. Eriana had trusted him, and now — the team had scattered, too overwhelmed to even reach the point where they would have really needed to rely on arcane pathfinding, and none of them had prepared for this.

Perhaps Toland had. The distant Light had felt like him, had conjured up the smells of the books he carried, or the rangy way he braced the spinal gun against himself. Eris looked up at the cliff in front of her, the golden light shining at the top. Nothing skittered in the shadows. She had seen Guardians share Light before, effortless merging of signatures that tugged at one another like strings.

She had not expected to experience this, so to do so in such a surprising way was galling.

Eris Morn began to climb.

Toland had spoken to her in clipped and quiet rages on streets from which he had had been exiled. He had presented a Warlock bond to her in the caves like he was doing something forbidden, as if he had expected her to survive when the others had not.

She hardly had words for this. Was it hatred? Was it the kind of obsession that had led Toland to the Hive in the first place, a disgust so intent upon its subject that it turned into dependent love?  

Her stomach turned. She had heard that love could do that, too. Not much purpose to it if it felt the same as sickness.

Breathing hard, she commanded herself to climb a few more handholds, to listen for noises other than the dripping water and erratic, fetid wind.

In some impossible tugging sixth sense she felt Toland the Shattered die on the rampart spikes of his terrible curiosity. The part of himself that was not Light at all spiraled into the impossible gray geometries of some mad maelstrom. Eris found the next handhold and wondered if she should hold her knife in her mouth to free her other hand, then kicked off and tumbled herself over onto the next wet ledge with the knife held shining up in front of her. What a way to learn that she was loved. Maybe it meant something that this tunnel was sloped slightly upward, or that the golden glow from its crystals and sporish dust was strong. Maybe the surface was nearby. (It had been four hours since she had last seen Eriana-3.)

Maybe Toland had nodded, recognizing the mirror of himself, before he died.


	5. Reconnaissance [Eris/Toland]

“To whom are you least loyal?”

“What?” The crackling of the ripped webs in the wind from the open side of the hallway had been too loud for Eris to hear the words.

Toland dragged long fingers in the muck coating the egg. Twitching gray slashes of static cut across his forearms. A reconnaissance, an experiment – both at once. He spoke as if he wasn’t quite paying attention, as if he walked light-headed and hungry. 

"There are breeding pits filled with protein and tar.”

Eris folded her hands against her sleeves. “There is clear air on the Tower balconies.” 

Suddenly Toland’s arms bled orange to the elbows. He twisted, dug around inside one of the last remaining eggs of the Titan brood. “This is an adaptation.

These would not be possible without the gravity and humidity of this world. The Wizards have been working. These are the children of Titan.”

"Our foothold here is hard-won,” Eris said.

The slimy mass Toland pulled out of the egg was curled and only as long as his forearm. Eris recognized the bare skull of a thrall, heavy and translucent. Tell Sloane, she remarked to herself. Tell Sloane that Toland visited her demesne, too. 

"Give it to me,” Eris said, and killed the last of the brood herself, and silently gloried in a revenge like a deep breath, and Toland watched. Eris heard the muttered words clearly this time.

"To whom are you least loyal?”


	6. The Nature of Warlocks [Eris/Toland, Amanda]

There were rumors of Osiris, and one day Amanda asked Eris whether Toland had been like a Warlock, before, and Eris turned the thought over and over like a stone in her hands. 

Amanda meant this: Was a wandering mind essential to Warlockness? Did Toland the Shattered ask strange questions? Did he seem to drift light in his armor? Did people trust his answers? Was there something in the way he used his Light that called to the Dark? Would they, if they saw these things in Osiris, know that he had fallen? 

Eris answered this way, to herself: The first time Toland had kissed her, reality had been sloughing off of him like dead skin. 

Eris answered this way, to Amanda: “Change comes gradually as the Light slips. Toland walked across coals to meet his change.” 

Amanda furrowed her brow.

“Seems to me Osiris did the same thing.” 

Eris did not answer. It was difficult for her to consider answering, when such a direct statement pinged around into so many branching questions in her head. She nodded slightly, though, and saw that Amanda understood the terms of her agreement.


	7. Daily Schedule [Eris, Toland]

Savathûn had given the Hive a cutting bureaucracy. Her knights would not stab on sight in her thronerealm, but past sight they watched for lapses in syntax, slumps in affect, glances that implied one thousand different references and politenesses. Eris Morn walked between the trip-wires of their regard. Some knights flinched back at her silent remarks, because of their subtlety or audacity, but most stood at indifferent attention, spell-sworn, edged in black skin rough as volcanic rock.

So it was something of a shock to see the sloppiness of the self-appointed errant emissary, once she finally made her way to his guarded quarters. Toland the Shattered (and put back together in different forms, bleeding at the edges, shattered and re-made and re-broken and – ) sitting on the edge of a black table, steepled his fingers.

Eris knew the ritual for this. First, definitions: “What do you do?” The verb was vague enough to be a trap, specific enough for the response to define a new set of terms with which they could play.  


Toland the Shattered disregarded the tradition with a lazy lean, as if about to collapse back onto the desk. A thin white smile implied bruises and bites.

He spoke with Guardian slang, shocking her with homesickness. "I wake up. I placate the screaming orbs of destruction. I go about my day.” Figured that he would be able to ignore the Hive even while sleeping in their holes and consuming the fruits of that particular underworld –

That, Eris reminded herself, was why she had found him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Built from the prompt "Oh, you know – I wake up, I placate the screaming orbs of destruction, I go about my day.” from oopsprompts via thexostranger.


	8. Stitches [Zavala]

“Who taught you how to do this?”

The speaker is a new visitor, an Awoken Titan with strings straggling across her lap. Commander Zavala rearranges the scarf folded beside him. The group is sitting on a balcony today, full out in the sun. Birds have returned to the city, dark dashes sketched in the sky the level of the Tower. The Guardians had been talking, the rise and fall of voices now coherent, now vague like bird-song.

“Resit Alaia, a weaver who provided for the Tower,” Zavala says. “Cryptarch Adonna taught him. We started to talk more often when I became Vanguard Commander, and we would sit out in the sun just like this.”

Not a bittersweet memory, not a vigil by a grave; ironic that of all the old Vanguard, Osiris had been the one who returned. The other Titan nods, fumbles a stitch and digs short fingernails in to rework it.

“Count the stitches, Commander, he would tell me, when the Wall seemed like it might not hold. Sometimes that’s all you can do.”


	9. Dashing [Amanda, Ikora, Eris]

“It’s been a long time since she’s been in a race for the fun of it. Think this will draw the crowd?”

“One does not need to prophesy to see the grand sweep of the hills, the fall of the snow. The same seems true of this celebration.” 

“Ain’t that true.” Amanda Holliday let her voice trail off as her gaze wandered from the dark figure beside her to the gray-edged mountains beyond the Farm, then to the Sparrows idling on the new track. Someone pumped the pedals, spiked boots gripping slotted metal while the engine roared. 

Amanda organized most of the races herself, but this time she had placed a stalwart Frame on flag-waving duty and given herself and Eris plenty of time to find a good spot among the crowd at the start/finish line. In one gloved hand she held a thermos of tea, piping hot and made with city supplies and Zavala’s inside information. Ikora liked chamomile and mint, no sugar, at the end of a long day. 

The Frame dropped the flag. Amanda was lost in the flashing colors of the Sparrows, the engine sounds she could pick out one by one — _that’s my work. That’s Eva’s. That’s Shera’s._ It was a five-lap race, and they _jostled_ — quick around turns not made for Sparrows but for feet, quick and sliding around the corner between the chicken coops and the cryptarch’s, opening it up on the wider road down past the landing zone. Sparrow engines howled. Guardians cheered and waved, loud despite mouths muffled by scarves against the falling snow. Beside Amanda, Eris was quiet but tense with the deep, loyal focus of a sportswoman, raising hunched shoulders every time the purple Sparrow flew by. 

Five laps went by, five laps in which Amanda thought not about the near-loss of the City and the brittle new-Sparrow-smell of the Tower but instead about heating coils and fuel mixes and taking wide turns; five laps were over too soon. Ikora had drawn the crowd. More and more Guardians pressed in toward the finish line or spread out along the track. 

It ended, of course, in the way Amanda had known it would end. She had arranged the race because she knew that it would be worth the time to run it because of this ending. The purple Sparrow shot through the finish line first as if it was headed for the forest and didn’t plan on stopping. The rider reacted fast, though, digging in on the right side and fishtailing around in an efficient kick that slammed her to a stop. Other riders skidded into a gregarious pack behind her, Guardians dismounting to give one another triumphant whoops and in-jokes that doubled them over as soon as their eyes met. Ikora Rey walked through the crowd, giving a pat on the back here and a wave there.

Of course, she knew that Amanda had arranged the race as a show of morale, to prove that the Vanguard was undaunted by its long campaign against the Cabal. Of course she beelined to Amanda, who handed the tea to Eris even though she hadn’t expected to do it and gave Ikora a collision of a hug instead. Eris handed Ikora the tea and received a fond smile and a lingering look in return. 

“True prophecy.” Amanda gently knocked her elbow against Eris’ arm. 

“True,” Eris murmured.


	10. Pantheon [Guardians, Eris/Toland]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Based on Jen's reply to warlordfelwinter's post: "Guardians sending prayers to their Iron Lord idols, to Wei Ning, to Eriana, because their spirits are one with the Light ... Cut to the Red War, when everyone loses their Light and thus their connection to these spirits they rely on for emotional support."

Of all behaviors that had become strange to her, the whispered prayers were not on the top of the list: it was the forgetting, the careless scavenging of weapons of the Dark, that set Eris on edge. To hear a Warlock whisper “ _Eriana-3_ ,” in Eris’ presence because they felt that some spirit might linger around the balcony but did not see fit to talk to the living woman about it was a lesser sin.

Still, when she heard her own name whispered, by a Warlock no less, the effect was more of startlement than reverent benediction. This Warlock, the one who had cleansed the heart of the Black Garden, should know better.

She also knew enough to almost read Eris’ mind.

“It isn’t worship,” Kass said softly. An actual Hunter stood beside her, but did not seem inclined to pay her respects. “It’s memory. Do you ever feel like another person is with you, watching you over your shoulder? Even though maybe you’ve never met them? Some call that prayer.”

“My fireteam was lost to the Light,” Eris said. The wound will not be as raw in three years, will not even be as raw when she stands on the vault-deck of the Dreadnaught with Ikora Rey’s and Mara Sov’s plans in mind. Now, though, the ghosts of which the Warlock spoke were so close that they could not help but pass through her mouth. “There would be nothing left to which to pray.”

The Warlock did not reply, although her painted brow furrowed as she considered it.

The Hunter remained masked, but her voice was crisp, clarified. “Respectfully, Crota’s Bane. There is a belief that the Light contains memories of all Guardians, from their rise to their last death. In this way, even those who face the Hive never truly lose their connection to the Light.” She says it as if she has rehearsed it, gone over it with Kass or someone else, and the words turn a bit less sure and more natural at the end.

Eris is unsure how to reply; if she dwells on this she will remember Omar’s screams in enough detail to make the sunny Tower walk go black. She cannot afford this. Instead, she tips her head at the two Guardians in confusion and dismissal at once. Politely, they go.

Not many are so polite. Eris has learned to see a particular type of rejection in which Guardians whom turn away from her forget that she exists. No scorn or care with which she presented them could be heard, after that; it would fall into their dismissal as into a black hole. These two were different, even though she could not sense whether or not any Light from them lingered. They remembered her, and maybe they remembered her fireteam truly as well.

* * *

“Are you _unhappy_ that no one weeps at your empty grave?” Eris said.

Toland hooked his ankle behind Eris’ leg, idly swinging his foot back and forth and pulling hers with it. Behind him, Eris could see the sweep of Saturn’s rings and the stars beyond; her once-and-again companion was corporeal enough to sit on the edge of the console in front of her jumpship seat but not enough that she could not see patches of green-tinted stars behind his shoulders.

“After the Red War, many bright and newborn keepers at the alter of the Light found themselves curtained in the darkness.” Toland idly waved a hand in the direction of the stars. “The spirits of the past were obvious in that Vex world, but all else … swallowed up by the sea. The Guardians do have a habit of not taking opportunities offered to them.”

“You’re jealous …” Eris pulled back. Instead of stiffening his foot Toland went limp, shrugged forward onto her lap with one leg thrown over the arm of the chair. Catching him in an equally listless embrace, Eris continued her question against his ear. “…of Osiris?”

He shook his head just slightly. She could imagine but not see the curl on his lips. “Feh. He has always had shrines.”

“No one expects you to return to the Light, least of all yourself.”

“A cutting and honest observation.” His face pressed against hers, but his voice was muffled as he spoke into her cowl, and she knew it was an effort at deflection they both recognized as transparent. He tended to confuse _less subtle_ with _more honest_ , but she appreciated the effort. He expected her to easily speak his language, and he was right. “Yet you still serve that which you cannot see.”

“We are not so different from the Guardians, in that way.” The response was too easy, but she was beginning to feel that he was actually serious about feeling left out of the Guardian pantheon, despite all evidence saying that he would not and had not gathered a cult the size of Osiris’ Brothers and Sisters … “Osiris does not want his cult. And there are Guardians who remember you.”

Toland drew back to look at her. Yes, there had been people who wore weapons made of living bone and skin, people who pored over what was left of his journals, Guardians who watched but did not repeat his crimes for fear of Vanguard punishment.

“Still, I would be oh so curious to know what happened to them when the Light was gone,” Toland said. “The ring of spears has broken down.”

Eris shifted to tuck her hand under his leg. She could feel a prickling, like dead nerves, but not the warmth of skin or breath when he spoke against her mouth.

“Let us watch how they rebuild it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (No one relies on Toland for emotional support, not even Toland.)


	11. Warning [Toland, Eris]

Dearest Eris,

Let me tell you about death.

I saw my body on its back in the black dust. The Deathsinger grew disinterested in it quickly and tracked my spirit instead, but that chase was disinteresting to her as well, and she turned away from it to peruse her demesne.

The Cabal show this ambivalence to the City’s defenses. Consider the blackening body I saw in the Pit, curled and thinned to its last remaining parts. Consider the infectious Hive, the optic nerves stringing themselves into new passages and the lacunae opening in bone like the Moon’s old scars. Consider the Earth from the sky, the few lights! Those mechanical lights which are also eyes, which consider the Tower nation with the flip of a coin.

Your decision has been made already?

Tell me, if you might, whether you see your own death so clearly.


	12. Changeling [Aurash, Taox, Nokris]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Monsters also look under their beds. Nokris is troubled by dreams.

Many species recite legends about shapeshifters and parasites. This is what Taox told Aurash one night, when a storm blew glow-bulbs off their stalks and high into the dark wind tossing around the towers, and the engines chugged in steady rhythm. Every planet around Fundament nightmared about the gloomy consequences of raising another species’ child, said Taox.

Aurash was cocooned in blankets and growing pains, almost asleep for the night, holding still against the healthy ache of youth. “What if we are changelings?” 

Taox knew where this was going, although she also marveled at the commonness of the princess’ fantasy, and at Aurash including her sisters in the story. Sathona and Xi Ro slept in fine, warm nests on the other side of the room, Taox’s arm-span away. 

“Then you will discover your true family, and choose it or this one, for joy or ruin,” said Taox. She had not heard a story of this type in a long time, but knew how it should go. She was an engineer, not a storyteller; perhaps the sisters trusted her because she did not pretend to mother them. 

Aurash turned over in her little cocoon to look at her sisters. Their skin gleamed almost the same color as the silk blankets. 

_A dream-answer,_ Taox thought, _but an answer nevertheless._

Millennia later, Nokris thrashed awake from muddy, violent dreams in which past mixed with future. He dipped his claw into the ice and ran the slush between his hands to remind himself of the persistence of the particulate, of how real it was and at the same time how it was melting away. He performed ablutions and checked in one slow, sweeping blink that his brood-troops were fanned out in battle lines across the pole of Mars. These took less than a millennia and more than a day. 

“I dreamed I had an ominous aunt,” said Nokris. On his morning he sat on a low and translucent throneplane with one foot on Freehold, the other on the lowest slopes of Olympus Mons. 

“Don’t trouble yourself about dreams,” said Xol, curling to hide its rancid belly at a less vulnerable angle. “And besides, she never tithed. So, she died.” 


	13. Open Gate [Eris, Rasputin, Toland]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Even with all of his ghostliness, Eris could still scare Toland now and then. Set after the Warmind campaign.

Even with all of his ghostliness, Eris could still scare Toland now and then. This time, she gave herself the role of specter he usually adopted and appeared to him as he stood on the edge of Rasputin’s core. Even incorporeal as he was, he was unwilling to stand vulnerable on the catwalk. It had been so easy to know where he would go.

“We do not all fear as we once did.” The foggy byproduct of Eris’ teleportation drifted green and shadowy around her. “We are not all as brave as we once were.” 

Toland had been terrified of Rasputin, once. Now, they looked at one another and ignored one another with equal weight. Toland was immune to blasts from orbit; Rasputin was immune to mere English. Rasputin’s newfound alliance with the Guardians had enabled this more mild truce as well. 

“He has satellites everywhere, watching, _watching_ , **_watching_** …  ” Toland did not turn around. His head was bowed, not in a sign of deference to the warmind bunker but in a petulant hunch like a vulture. “Those guns, pointed out toward the universe. They would do little more than ripple the storms of Jupiter if they hit, but Earth itself … 

“He _won_ , Eris. Rasputin became the protector of Earth as much as the Traveler was, and now he chooses what to do with this new pinnacle. Guardians are forever refusing the power handed directly to them, injected right into their bones! Humble fools.” 

Eris raised a hand, swirling the fog around her. “You speak as Nokris did. Do not confuse the Sword Logic for another type of power.” _Ana Bray is neither humble nor a fool._

“Rasputin and the runt Xol were neither allies nor enemies. They shared space, shared tenancy with rent due to the skeletons of the scientists who mapped Mars. Nevertheless, Xol lost and Rasputin won. This is a challenge.” 

She struggled to understand why he was trying to conceal his argument. “It may be a challenge to humanity as well. The Vanguard fears.”

“And Savathûn does not.” Toland turned, walked the few steps back across the gantry and into the doorway where Eris lurked. 

“I see,” she said. “And that is why you stay under her wing.” 

This time she turned her back to Toland, and took his place in front of Rasputin. The lights of the Warmind did not change their gleaming for her either. How _would_ it change the next war? Would Earth be the next planet framed between the coils of the mile-high acceleration guns? The Vanguard thought so. Ikora thought so. 

Eris would not push Toland further. Savathûn or the thought of her, even the god-version of her he imagined might lift a claw to acknowledge him, would comfort him. Here in the bunker, plans surely pinging from one side of his mind to the other like the signals in Rasputin’s core, he was frightened enough already. 


	14. Constellation [Rasputin, Guardian]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Set after the Warmind campaign.

Just as the Hive swarmed the server room, Kass began to understand what Rasputin wanted.

She squeezed the trigger, knocking a hulking frozen Knight backward. More skittered between the nearest columns. The weapon fired with metallic pops, like bronze against bronze, ancient and volatile. Her Light, bolstered by the other two Warlocks around her, swept through her in a gentle shock that made her hair stand up. The Storm, in this electrified place, was ready.

She swept her hand out toward the two nearest Knights and summoned the lightning. Forks of fire jumped between her and the servers, reminding her of the damage they had inflicted on Rasputin already while trying to forge the spear. He had suffered enough…

His mind inhabited the sparks of her power. His voice was not the same she had heard over the primate radios connecting the satellites. Here, Rasputin spoke more clearly, as if Russian and static had become Kass’ native tongue.

(Except her native tongue was the storm, and Rasputin said …)

_I can withstand this._

Kass engulfed the two Knights in lightning. Sparks jumped from her hands to the servers.

Rasputin said, _I have gained what I wanted. The worm is dead. Ana is safe. Her family’s work has been preserved. I have been preserved._

Kass lifted off the floor. Thrall swept in, a numberless crowd cold with rime, and she channeled the lightning into their pitted bones. The thrall exploded in a white cloud. 

_Your people, the Guardians, are not the only protectors of the solar system._

One of her teammates threw a grenade on the other side of the room, sending another cascading conversation of lightning jumping between Rasputin’s synapses and her. The bunker _had_ been damaged by their earlier efforts. Rasputin had felt the heat alarms go off and burned and slammed safeguards down around himself and started to rebuild. He did not need comfort, only to know the hum of processes running. Repair was still a sign of life. 

A guardian could survive that much. 


	15. Eyes Up [Ana Bray]

Ana Bray lay staring up at her Ghost.

Red dust blew across her visor. Some of the cold had sunk into her back, the padded armor on her arms keeping her limbs warmer than her core. _Ghost_ , she _knew_ , and pushed the word like putty around in her head. She knew little else. Why here? Why _Mars_ , the name of the planet as certain as the name of the drone that floated, just out of reach?

She raised her hand. The Ghost drifted down to it, central light blinking like an eye. Ana pinched one of its conical sections between her fingers, then shook it.

“Hello.”

“Eyes up,” the drone said gently.

“They are.”

“You may be a bit disoriented.”

“Yeah. What part of Mars is this?"

“Freehold.”

Ana sat up. In front of her, red plains stretched out, softened and confused by the dust. Behind her, buildings and black machinery perched like animals with bent legs. 

“How did we get here?”

 _Assess the situation. Look for every explanation. Assume nothing._ She could not be sure there was a good reason to ask about the drone first.

The flanges twitched. The eye-light lowered, as if the Ghost was abashed. “My friend, this may be confusing to you at first, but I want to make it very clear that what I am about to tell you could get us in more trouble than we already are. Mars is a hostile planet. We are alone. We have each other — and I have been looking for you for such a long time. I’m so glad to find you that I … wanted you to have this. But please, understand that it might make our lives harder.” 

Ana leaned forward. The Ghost sounded so sincere. And that combination contradiction and embrace — we are alone but we have each other — settled around her like a warm cloak. She could _feel_ that it was true. “Go on.”

“Make our lives harder as in probably get a moderate to severe yelling, as well as possibly encountering monsters bigger than the usual monsters. I tell you this in secret and in trust, Ana. Do you want to know the answer to your question?”

“Yes.” _Always._ “How did we get here?”

“I came here because the Light brought me here. I am a servant of the Light, brought to raise Guardians to fight the Darkness.”

Ana considered at least one question for each emphasized word, discarded them all for now.

“You’ve been dead for … a long time. Guardians don’t usually know who they were before they died. Do you remember?”

“No. But I’m beginning to think _you_ do.”

The Ghost sighed. “Something like that.”

“Tell me.”

Her name badge shimmered into existence, projected from the Ghost like a hologram. She recognized the name, but not the face. Her left hand drifted up to touch the helmet keeping her safe from Martian winds. “Okay. Shelter first, then, questions. _A lot of questions._ My friend. _”_

“Always. I was wondering about the installation behind you, before I found you.”

“Me too. Maybe if we can start asking the same questions, we’ll be all right.”


	16. Reunion [Zavala, Ana]

_Life is a delicate thing._

“I thought you were dead.” 

“Yeah. That’s what happens when someone fakes her death.” Ana Bray folded her arms and put her back to her equipment. 

Outside, projectiles splashed toward a thrall infestation on a distant red hillside. _If the glass broke …_ Commander Zavala pulled his thoughts back to the present. Let her posture. The Vanguard Commander could take it.

“One message. You sent _one_ , and then the next time I see you, you’re interfering with Rasputin more than the Vanguard ever did,” Zavala said.

“I saved him. The Guardian stopped the worm. We keep this area safe because of what we, and Rasputin, did. Is that not worth it?” Ana’s voice rose. Just like the threat from outside, he could take that too. A Hunter paused on the steps, surprised to see the Vanguard present and unwilling to walk up any further. 

“Not if you disrupt years of protocol in the course of —”

“Protocol based on an incorrect understanding! It was practically _myth_ , the way you all spoke about Rasputin. I _knew_ him.” 

Zavala couldn’t help raising his own voice. “I thought I lost you!”

“With the way we were when you left, most of the time I thought you couldn’t possibly miss me.” Her jaw was clenched, her eyes wide. 

He stopped. 

She was right to be angry. It felt like millennia ago that they had argued before Twilight Gap. It felt equally distant that they had talked before Xol was discovered on Mars. And in all that time, had he ever really thought about what it had cost her? What had it cost Camrin, who had balanced her place in Owl Sector and her girlfriend’s safety? Surely Camrin had known who Ana was, eventually. Somehow, he had been too focused on the Tower (how Titan — so focused on keeping the walls up) to sympathize with them.  

Zavala had thought Ana was one of his failures, in so many different ways. His fear had made him angry, and if there was any hope for the two of them to reconcile now, he would have to extend a hand…regardless of whether Rasputin was a savior or a threat. 

He let go a held breath. “Now that it’s all over, I see that I acted … badly. I’m sorry I stood in your way.”

She was taken aback, blinking for a moment while she decided what to say. The Hunter behind them soft-footed down the stairs.

 “I appreciate that, sir,” Ana said.  

 _Next time, you tell one of the Vanguard what you’re up to._ Zavala acknowledged his protective bitterness, then resisted the urge to get in a parting shot. It wouldn’t help. 

Life is a delicate thing. In Zavala’s age-old experience, knowing that was part of what being a Guardian was. Impossibilities become commonplace, until Zavala sometimes forgot that for most of history, they were impossible. As an Awoken, he was doubly impossible.

All the more reason to value the sort of bond that had kept humanity going for all of recorded time. Life was a resilient thing. He glanced backward, and saw that the Hunter had given up trading with Ana for now. Zavala would leave soon, would give Ana the space he had known she needed. Maybe, like Suraya Hawthorne, she would find a new way to liaise between civilians and Guardians. Already, the Clovis Bray research had offered new weapons and tech. 

“I did miss you,” he said, quieter. “I had grown unused to people being gone for good. Twilight Gap and the Red War both taught me different. But I am glad, now, to have discovered that someone I thought gone was not lost.” 

“We’ll both try to keep it that way,” Ana said softly. 

“Between you, the Guardian, and Cayde, it’s a wonder I can keep track of anyone at all.”

“Was that a joke? Honestly, please, it’s hard to tell.” 

Zavala smiled. When Ana returned it he saw the tension ease away from her. He turned away, letting her and the Guardians return to their work. 


	17. The Queen [Eris/Toland]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In conversation with Exordiumnoctis.

Eris Morn rules only the empty halls and the worm system and the one lonely ghost. Nevertheless, she rules, and takes control of the Dreadnaught but refuses to turn it into a weapon.

The worms grow but not into leviathans; the cycle of eating continues as life does but thralls ration their hunger and knights begin to consider new songs.

The power in the Court flows to her. Guardians visit to see her, to feel her. Her presence wafts in the green-black fog. Their tithe is still violence, is still gunfire and exotic lightning, but it is also teamwork and friendship, laughter and memory.

And the other ghost —

Eris Morn walks half-in and half-out of the world, her eyes bright, her hair bared, her horns glimmering with conjured, poisoned emeralds. Toland the Shattered is a weather system, a bodiless scathing will, until Eris draws power back to both of them.

He stands shocked, Warlock coattails heavy around his legs. He waits, amused and curious, examining his own hands. Until Eris appears to tell him that she has lowered one plane into another. The curtain was always sheer on the Dreadnaught, translucent as the band across Eris’ eyes. Toland shivers, and asks her what she commands.

She explains it coldly, giving him the gift of through information, while he approaches. She knows the wheels that spin behind his eyes. She demonstrates the permeance of reality by embracing him, her arms around his shoulders. Obviously, says the brush of his dry cheek against her ichor-smeared face. Obviously this is the way we will learn the world, say his hands against her stomach. Finally, says all of her — all this magic and power, and she has never been as relieved as she is today. And his mouth is against one of the horns sprouting on the back of her head, although she cannot feel it, cannot tell whether it is keratin or jewel against his tongue.


	18. “What’s so bad about Gambit?” [OCs]

“What’s so bad about Gambit?” 

Kass pushed a tangle of spicy ramen into her mouth just as Guile-11 asked the question. He kept playing with his chopsticks, waiting for his human companion to finish.

Kass shook her head. Best not to say. Best not to let even the name of the Dark out. 

“You new here?” On Guile’s other side, Jenev pointed a chopstick at him, one of her filed nails digging a curl of pale wood out of the ramen shop’s cheap utensils.

“I work mostly with Amanda.” Guile’s voice was, as usual, calm with a tinge of arrogance. Yellow canine teeth spiked the back of his jaw. “So, no.”

“Huh.” Jenev sat back.

Although Kass had been on a fireteam with Guile once or twice, she still didn’t know him well, and now that she wore the cowl of a priest in one of the Traveler temples in the cloth octant, she thought it was unlikely that they would both be out in the field at the same time again. She didn’t recognize the sharp-clawed Awoken at all.  

Jenev said, “Drifter talks like a Warlock sometimes. I’d think you’d like that.” 

Kass shook her head. 

“People say it makes Guardians use the Darkness,” Guile said, “but I don’t see how it’s any more dangerous than practice-killing in the Crucible.”

 _Fine._ “These Guardians command Taken to go after the other team,” Kass said. “And the Motes themselves are made of something that … if it isn’t Darkness itself, it smells like it. Don’t those arenas smell like death to you? It leaves a bad taste in my mouth.” 

Jenev considered it. Her expression went far away, then caught again on the corner of the bar closest to the half-open gate. “Going up against somebody like Uldren, I’ll use whatever I can get. Days are different now. The curse in the Dreaming City … we’re all a little darker now, even if we don’t want to be.”

“That just means we need to fight the Darkness more,” Kass said, then stared into her bowl. They would think she sounded like a zealot. Maybe she _had_ become too cloistered. Just because she didn’t want to touch the Taken more than she had to didn’t mean the Vanguard were wrong about Gambit …

Jenev’s thoughts seemed to have been following the same path, although from a different angle. “The Vanguard would stop him if they knew some of it, but they’re broken, now, too. Guardians for Guardians, I say.” 

“Or Lightbearers,” Guile mused.

“Exactly.” Jenev dug into her own ramen. 

Guile turned toward Kass. He hesitated to speak, but she could see those teeth again, his jaw working as he considered and reconsidered. “That Derelict looks like it’s about to fall apart. Won’t catch me up there until he explains his engines.” 

 _When does anything really get explained?_ They kept talking about exotic engines, and Jenev chimed in about connecting firing coils to Sparrow rigs, and when Kass left the Tower for the night she hardly tasted that death-char reek of Motes at all. 


	19. Scars [Drifter/Guardian, Ensemble]

Suraya asks with veiled accusation, as if looking for more payment for the bounty system they’ve arranged. The Drifter tells her the scars came from a mountain lion, furious and rare.

Saladin asks with unveiled dislike, couching the question in what he assumes. The Drifter tells him the scars came from the sharpened wooden stakes at the end of a warlord’s compound, proof of a quick exit. He asked his Ghost not to heal them (indeed, to rip them open anew) to remember the close call.

Kassius, the Guardian who killed the Taken King, asks with cold Warlock curiosity. She had to work up the courage, and the Drifter wonders whether she thinks she’s hiding that. He tells her the scars came from a pair of pikes at Twilight Gap, the best and terrible symmetry of a Fallen with two precise pairs of hands and nothing to live for but practicing war.

Jenev, the Guardian who wagered her Gambit wins for a kiss, asks with her sharpened nails barely touching his cheek. He asks her: What if I told you it was an arcane ritual? What if I told you, if you tugged the black-and-jade mask off any Shadow, they would have the same marks? He remembers blood sheeting across his face, and later, black flakes dissolving into red slurry when he tried to wash the dried blood out of his hair. Jenev watches him and tells a comforting lie.


	20. The Old Guard (Lord Saladin, Drifter]

Lord Saladin Forge did not fidget. His deliberation remained measured, his conviction as old and sure as his title. When he found himself tapping his fingers against his armor, he knew it was time for action, not distraction.

Nevertheless, it proved difficult for him to ask Ikora, Zavala, and Shaxx to meet him at her pavilion. Cayde’s death floated beside them like a Ghost, vulnerable and insistent. 

“First, my condolences. I see in the faces of the Guardians what Cayde meant to the Tower, and to you. But even in this time of grief we must remain vigilant.” Saladin glanced at Zavala. The word would bring up memories of Shaxx, old laws to which Zavala had always held strong. “The Drifter you have welcomed into the Tower cannot be allowed to stay. He’s a Lightbearer who swears no service to noble cause. From what I have heard, he may be as old as the Iron Lords themselves. I can’t claim to know his face. But I know the look of a warlord when I see one.” 

“He is in truth what many Guardians baselessly feared Eris Morn to be,” Ikora said.

“Yes,” Saladin said. ”This Gambit will create an army of Guardian-addicts, looking for blood. It isn’t organized, like the Crucible. It’s too much like real war. Too much like it was when humanity feared everything.” 

Ikora stared at him hard. She knew he would be remembering the first fall of Felwinter’s Peak, and Ghosts at the side of Warlord Segoth, and the Cabal’s war dogs unleashed. Hardest of all was for Saladin to meet Shaxx’s eyes.

To his surprise, Shaxx was the first person to defend the Drifter. “So far he has stayed out of the way. The matches are organized and observed to an acceptable standard.”

Unusually vague phrasing from Shaxx, Saladin noticed. The suspicion must have shown on his face, because Shaxx continued. “You’re right to be vigilant.” 

“The Drifter thinks much is hidden from us when it really is not,” Zavala said. “It isn’t just the gate drawn across his hallway that allows him a false sense of security.” 

“In reality, Cayde just tried to fix it and ended up with it stuck half way down.” Ikora laughed. It was a soft, sad sound, but her persistent smile warmed Saladin. 

Saladin sensed that he had pushed both subjects as far as Ikora wanted them to go, and nodded. 

Ikora turned to look at him more directly, with honesty and care in her tone. “We will be careful. And we will let you know if anything goes wrong.” 

Afterward they exchanged pleasantries and condolences, peeling back the layers of the Vanguard’s grief. Saladin tried to listen well. He tried to push back images of Lightbearer armies, of bear skins stabbed with titanium needles and hung on the walls of crumbling castles. It had been a cruel time, and the Tower made Earth a better world, and even the idea of the Drifter calling himself a Lightbearer instead of choosing a Guardian class unsettled him. What was once a way of life had now become gauche and presumptuous. Saladin did not doubt the Drifter knew that, too. Maybe those tone-deaf Shadows of Yor, flirting with darkness to see its easy smile, would be drawn to him, and Shaxx would come pick them up one by one.

He let the theory comfort him. Ikora’s presence meant he could file it away with the other mysteries of Warlocks. Before the Iron flag flew again, he planned to ask Efrideet’s opinion, too. 

His fingers tapped, one against another. 


	21. From the Journals of Ikora Rey

**From the journals of Ikora Rey**

After the reawakening of the Traveler, Guardians reported increased instances of tangibility of the Light. They talk about it more and more as if it is a material with dimensionality and mass, not energy but precipitation. Motes of Dark, the Blind Well, and perhaps the exotic effects in the forest around the largest broken shard of the Traveler are evidence of this increased permanence or weightiness.

The Light has always been a presence. It insists upon itself, even while the Traveler is silent. The loss of the Light itself illustrated that with the silence in its wake. But these effects, like a Rift, were personal and impermanent. Even the energy generated by the Court of Oryx did not permanently coat those walls, and was not either pure Light or pure Darkness.

Now …

Gambit’s banks, supposedly outside the purview of the Vanguard, have been particularly useful in my studies of these more physically permanent manifestations. Motes melt like steel, and the energy of the Darkness is funneled away to … what? The Derelict? Its workings remain secret beyond the ready room.

They won’t be for long.

Guardians talk more and more of hoarding Light or Dark, keeping it like a dragon keeps gold. Or do we simply look at the Light differently now that we lost it once? Perhaps this is an effect of the Traveler’s strange awakening.

Considering revising On Circles in light of the architecture of the Dreaming City. Just need to find the time.


	22. No Time To Explain [Drifter]

Can’t just say some things. Spider and I can’t just talk about what you do with the Ghosts afterward but I seen he hangs his. It’s gaudy. I used to leave pieces of the shells on the floor. Somebody’s boot hits a little piece and they wonder about it, worry it under their foot a little, pick it up. Worry a little more, about what colors they’re wearing and whose hall they’ve been drinking in.

Can’t just explain some things unless you were there. The first time I saw that Iron Banner fly it gave me a fright, but turns out the wolves don’t come here. Used to be the wolves weren’t just pictures on a wall. They smell like wet dog, have shoulders up to your ribs. One night Iron Lords got after our gang with wolves and guns. Lightbearers do better against guns. For wolves you best shoot a couple mercenaries who thought they’d be all right coming along without Ghosts. Their limping will distract wolves fast enough, as long as you don’t shoot ‘em dead. Just emblems now, I tell myself, and Saladin doesn’t come around here.

It ain’t polite to say we’re all one decision away from the Collapse again, although I think you all hear it. Yes, you do. That echo in the back of your head that says you’re Risen for a reason. It’s tempting to see the beauty in the wind, but really? It’s all just cold air.

Got some people asking what’s next. What’s the story for old Drifter? What’s the end game for this long Gambit? Can’t just say some things, sister. You’re a smart one. You’ll see soon enough.


End file.
